


Falls Down and Will Not Mend

by saltstreets



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, M/M, Minor Character Death, Not totally bleak I promise, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:27:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25905847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/pseuds/saltstreets
Summary: It's more difficult to be someone at the end of the world than Solomon Tozer might have expected.
Relationships: Lt Edward Little/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 31
Kudos: 41
Collections: The Terror Big Bang 2020





	Falls Down and Will Not Mend

**Author's Note:**

> Woooo! Hello there! This is the first Big Bang I've ever participated in, and I've been wanting to do one for ages- so it's been an excellent first for me.
> 
> My partner in this undertaking is the brilliant and talented Frauke, without whom I would quite frankly be a shadow of the person I am today. Her gorgeous artwork is embedded within the story, and you can also look at it in high-res, rebloggable glory [here.](https://thegoodthebadandtheart.tumblr.com/post/627793691041480704/i-was-lucky-enough-to-claim-zevons-fic)
> 
> The title here is from Death Is Not The End, specifically thinking of the [Bad Seeds version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ecZJAHCpX0). Take that as you may.

Tozer opens his eyes and sees endless white, bright and stretching out pristine before him, and for one hazy, shocked instant he wonders if he’s seeing Heaven. Then his vision focuses, the white clarifying into shades of greys reaching out to meet an overcast horizon. He sees that what had initially appeared to be flat, undisturbed land is made of broken stones and ice, and Tozer remembers that he’s not in Heaven. He’s in the Arctic.

And also, it would seem, not yet dead.

He is lying on the ground. His cheek and forehead hurt where his face digs into the rock. Tozer shifts, and immediately a red-hot poker of agony twists in his left shoulder and shudders all down his side.

“ _Auhh-”_ He wants to shout but it hurts to make sound. His throat is beyond parched and hovers somewhere between sandpaper and rusted metal. Tozer squeezes his eyes shut against the pain and grits his teeth, but that hurts too so he stops: he’s been luckier than some of the others, but his molars are still rattling loose in too-soft gums.

Very well. Try again. Slower this time, and keeping weight off of the left shoulder that is ringing and throbbing with a sharp pain, impossible to ignore now that he’s become aware of it. Tozer levers himself up into a sitting position, sucking air through his nose. Each movement is its own journey of discovery: his hands and feet are numb, his stomach feels cavernous, his knees ache from being sprawled over the sharp shale. There is also the matter of his shoulder, which feels out of place as well as being on -metaphorical- fire. He reaches up and gives an exploratory prod. Something is wet there and the contact sends a spindle of increased hurt through the whole arm. His fingers come away bloody.

Turning his neck hurts as well but he cranes to look anyway.

It’s not pretty. His shirt is clawed away from the collar across his back and beneath it- well, he’s fairly sure he’s seeing bits of himself a man isn’t supposed to be able to look at. He twists his head away quickly. Bile rises in his throat.

He doesn’t fight it. He empties his stomach onto the ground, narrowly avoiding his own trousers. He stares at the sick for a moment before he thinks _that’s Billy Gibson,_ and nearly throws up again. Tozer shoves himself away from the mess he’s made, which is when he finally takes in the surroundings he finds himself in, and remembers why he is awake, and alone, and on the ice.

It isn’t a particularly pleasant remembrance, but it’s still better than his previous train of thought.

A little way away is the sledge just as it was the last he’d seen it. The canvas cover is undisturbed, and he notices with a tremor of unease the chains they’d attached to the bow.

The back of his skull still hurts from where Hickey had cracked him over the head with the rifle. _Fuck him,_ Tozer thinks angrily, before the thought seems to break a dam in his stubbornly fuzzy memory and images flicker into life like painted pictures in a magic lantern. Hickey, ranting atop the sledge. Hickey, bringing the creature down on them, and reaching out to it-

Damn. The creature. Tozer stands up quickly, and immediately regrets it as his head spins and his whole body complains. He winces and reaches around to touch at his shoulder again gingerly. “Fuck,” he says aloud, eyes watering, and then again because it didn’t help but it didn’t hurt either. “ _Fuck.”_ He casts his gaze about a bit haplessly for something he might be able to bandage the wound with, although he doubts he could do much of a job of it by himself. There’s cloth to be had, but it’s all encrusted with the filth of the past months. And mostly on the backs of his dead comrades.

He turns away, slightly queasy. At least the deep gouges don’t seem to be freely bleeding. There’s also no sign of the bear creature, dead or alive, so he can relax on that front. For the moment.

But his shoulder. The arm feels as if it might be dislocated- Tozer has seen dislocated shoulders before, and has seen Doctor Stanley pop bones back into place with an unimpressed expression. He’s seen MacDonald do it as well, although with considerably more compassion. Maybe he can do it himself. It hadn’t seemed particularly difficult. Shouldn’t his shoulder know where it ought to go?

Tozer considers, and tugs up the front of his shirt, stuffing the fabric into his mouth between his rattling teeth. Best to protect them as best he can, now. He reaches across his chest and, after a second of indecision, grips himself at the elbow and attempts to shove it vaguely upwards.

The resulting pain makes his vision go spotted for a second. His arm, shoulder, and neck all feel as though they’re competing with each other to cause the most hurt as his bones grind sickeningly. And of course, the instinctive tensing of his muscles in reaction just sets off a whole chain of sharp, angry aches and bruises all over his body.

Tozer has felt pain before. He’s been knocked about in his time. He’s broken a few fingers and toes. He likes to pride himself on being able to tough out anything.

But he leaves his arm alone after that.

A slow pace around the sledge and associated wreckage reveals no trace of the beast. The snow and rock is too scuffled about from the earlier chaos to show tracks or shine any light on what had happened, and the last place Tozer remembers seeing the thing near where he had fallen shows only scattered gunpowder, bloody snow, and a few partial prints. And there are bodies, of course. Very specific bodies. It’s the boots he spots first- officer’s boots and fine ones at that, or they had been before a long trek across sharp rock, interment, and subsequent exhumation. Once he’s seen the boots he spots the rest of the corpse not far off, though he doesn’t spend time examining it overmuch.

So Cornelius is dead. Tozer feels a pang, the ghost of a feeling that had rattled its last breath as Hickey had boasted his madness from atop the sledge, stripped to his underclothes and knife in hand. Hickey had commanded Tozer’s loyalty for a while, or something like it. That had meant something. But Tozer thinks of Tommy, poor trusting Tommy who had wanted to go back to the ships. And he makes himself think of Crozier, weary and unimpressed by the man Tozer had followed to the end of all reason.

His foot strikes something that rattles metallically against the shale and Tozer looks down to see that length of chain again, accusingly bloody and cold.

Christ but he feels like a proper idiot.

The feeling multiplies when his sluggish brain finally taps him on the shoulder and gently asks the important question. Then Tozer twists himself frantically about searching the area, furious aches and pains notwithstanding. Crozier had been right in front of him on the chain, and now the man is nowhere to be seen. Neither living nor dead. Like the creature he has simply vanished.

Perhaps too little too late, but it offers at least some measure of comfort to think that the Captain had gotten loose, either by himself or with the help of someone. Tozer hopes it _had_ been a someone, and not a something. Or perhaps Crozier had been dead already when he’d been taken away. The last thing Tozer remembers is throwing him the key, and turning to face down the bear-thing for the final time.

He had gotten a shot off, a good shot. Had hit the creature in the throat. And then, that great horrible paw rearing back, and blackness.

He still doesn’t know how he isn’t dead. Or why he hasn’t lost his soul. At least, he doesn’t think he’s lost his soul. He feels the same as he’s always done, albeit in a considerable amount of pain.

Tozer risks another backwards glance at the butcher’s shop window that is his shoulder. His stomach turns but is too empty to do anything but contract helplessly.

Well, there isn’t much he can do about it now.

What he _can_ do is to find a length of rope and, after a few clumsy attempts, manage to tie it tolerably snugly around his chest, pinning the useless left arm to his side. It’s still difficult to clamber up the sledge and rummage about inside it with only one hand, but at least now his left arm isn’t swinging freely, bringing tears to his eyes with every white-hot stab of hurt it causes. The open wounds in his shoulder still pound agonisingly with every flutter his heart, but quite frankly Tozer will take what he can get.

He spends some time slowly shuffling through the debris, collecting a small assortment into a canvas sack. Biscuits, tinder…he picks up a battered canteen and shakes it, hearing the pathetic slosh of the nearly empty.

There are also a few crates of Goldner’s tins at the bottom of the boat. They are still the only real source of food despite everything and Tozer eyes them warily. Hickey had been wrong about many things but he hadn’t been lying about the food being wrong.

The tins gaze back at him, serene. Smug. Tozer spits on the ground. He feels uneasy putting six of the things into his pack, but better to have them than not.

He doesn’t want to wrestle his rifle too much with only one hand, but a quick examination satisfies him that the gun at least hadn’t suffered any ill-wear during the skirmish. He slings it over his good shoulder and feels almost himself again with the familiar weight of it against his back.

There is a moment of regret for his lost red coat, stripped from him back in the Terror camp before he and Hickey had been set to swing. But he’s not really a marine anymore, is he? Isn’t much of anything anymore.

He continues to pick through the contents of the sledge and the remnants of their miserable little party until he’s certain he has all the bullets and powder available. Then he sets off back down the hill to the camp, rifle and canvas bag over his shoulder.

The camp is eerily unchanged from how he’d last seen it, being force-marched out on the chain while Hickey howled and whooped like a man gone mad. The table, the tents. The fire pit, ashes now gone cold. He tries to avoid looking at Goodsir’s corpse still spread out on the bench like a macabre joke. The doctor’s flesh is greying in the weak morning light, glistening and distinctively unappetising. To think that not too long ago it had smelled so good in the cooking pot. Tozer hadn’t even gotten that particular meal. Hickey had clubbed him as he’d been about to take his first bite.

His slops are still in his tent where he’d left them. Manoeuvring the layers over his head is awkward with his bound arm and painful with the oozing open wound, but he is cold and clenches his teeth through it until the slops are back on. He tucks the end of the empty sleeve into a pocket to keep it out of the way and, after hesitating over a few more Goldner’s tins which he reluctantly stuffs into his makeshift pack along with the thin blanket from his bedroll, he leaves the camp without a backwards glance.

The further he gets from the place, the lighter he feels. Despite the stinging of his shoulder and the gnawing hunger in his belly, Tozer is almost cheery as he stomps across the slate. The sun has grown stronger. Even the pain in his shoulder has dulled somewhat. There is the dizzying knowledge that he is completely, entirely alone. Walking out into the directionless white and grey is almost peaceful in a way, with nobody to tell him who he is or what he should do. And he is alive. That last one is something to hang on to. He is alive. Whatever that means for now.

When he crests the top of a gentle incline and sees the tents pitched in the distance, his mood begins to drop. He hadn’t even really been trying to reach the other camp. There might not have been another camp anymore. But there it is, or part of it, unescapable. Only three tents. He frowns at that, and picks his way down the slope cautiously, careful to keep his rifle slung over his shoulder and well away from any sort of firing position. The last thing he wants is to be shot now by one of the men.

But, as it becomes awfully apparent the closer he draws near, he needn’t have worried.

The entire camp flaps like a filthy flag on a pole: the tents are barely still standing in the light breeze, and are the same greys and browns that everything is here. It’s quiet save for the repetitive dull smack of a rope against canvas like the weak, agonised throbbing of a heart. The sound reminds Tozer of a luffing sail. In irons. They are all in irons.

Thomas Jopson is lying on the rocks just outside of one of the pathetically drooping tents. Tozer kneels as best he can without jostling his arm, but even from afar it’s plain that Jopson is dead. Upon inspection the tents hold other dead men, their corpses listing into each other or sunken into fraying cots. Each tent has a little pile of tins before it, like small cairns or grave markers. Tozer leaves them alone.

He doesn’t have to look for too long before he picks up the familiar scraping tracks of a sledge been dragged away from the sorry scene. It isn’t a pretty story that is piecing itself together in front of him, but then again it isn’t as if he’s just come from anything remotely pleasing. And if even Jopson has been abandoned here- Tozer can’t quite expect a warm welcome from whoever might still live. But what other choice does he have? He supposes that he could sit here in the dead men’s camp and wait to join them, or he could strike out on his own and see how far along the unchanging landscape he can walk until collapsing. In the awful little camp, the vast stretch of ice and snow and stone suddenly no longer seems as freeing as it had done not even an hour before. With the wreckage of familiarity sprawled around him, the open Arctic has become oppressive once more.

The third option he has, then, is to follow these sledge tracks and find whatever sure fresh misery awaits him at the end of them.

Tozer looks around despairingly, half-hoping for somebody to materialise and tell him what to do. Nobody is forthcoming. Just his luck.

He heaves the canvas bag back onto his shoulder with a wince and plods on. The tins inside clink against each other and bump into his ribs uncomfortably. His previous high spirits have entirely evaporated.

The sledge marks he follows are occasionally clarified by a piece of abandoned debris: an empty Goldner’s tin here, a boot sole there. There are other things as well, bits and pieces of scrap, shed like snakeskin. It is an ominous trail like something from a nursery story, lost boys dropping stones to find their back home, although in this case they are moving in reverse.

He’s so focused on the ground ahead of him, teeth gritted trying to ignore the spasms in his shoulder each time his arm jostles, that he’s taken aback when he approaches another small rise and finds it to be a shelf of stone rather than a hill, and that there’s a figure below him, barely twenty feet away.

Tozer startles, automatically tensing and then letting out a grumble of agony as his left arm protests. The figure spins and looks up, rifle raised.

“Don’t shoot,” Tozer tries to say, but his voice doesn’t come easily, stumbling its way up through his dry throat and the words sputter out in a croak. He moves to duck an expected bullet but loses his footing on the loose shale, already weak legs skittering out from under him and sending him sprawling. He tries to put out an arm to brace the fall, and ends up tipping himself over onto his bundled left side, rocks crunching against already tender muscle and bone. Tozer howls.

He’s still sitting, cradling his shoulder and cautiously trying take inventory of his limbs when the figure clambers slowly over the top of the ridge and approaches. Tozer looks up, vision blurred by the tears that have sprung up in his eyes.

It takes him a second to recognise Lieutenant Little. The man is gaunt, his sunken eyes nearly obscured between the cap tugged low and his bushy whiskers.

Little stares at him, and then spits on the ground by Tozer’s sprawled limbs. Tozer is taken aback. “Lieutenant.”

“ _Sergeant,”_ Little growls, and he sounds furious. Tozer supposes that’s earned. But it’s still so unlike Little, whom he always thought of as passively dour more than anything, that he’s surprised. “Although I think it likely you’ve lost that title, if not for mutinying and attacking your own fellow men, then certainly for kidnapping and killing the captain.”

The accusation is almost ludicrously immediate, but Tozer is still stung, as if this is an argument they’ve been having for hours rather than what passes for a greeting in these parts, in these times. “I didn’t kill Captain Crozier,” he says sharply. He gets cautiously to his feet, uncertain if they will support him. Little makes no move to help. “As a matter of fact I-” he stops, suddenly hesitant. Little knows nothing of what had happened, with the creature, with Hickey. Tozer is uncertain of how much to tell. Or even of _how_ to tell. He falls back to a safe position, squaring himself and scowling. “I didn’t see _you_ coming to rescue him.”

Little, if possible, goes even paler. He truly does look awful. “Do _not,_ ” he rasps, “accuse _me_ of disloyalty _._ I did what I could. I did what I had to. Crozier- Crozier knew there was a possibility-” his voice cracks. Tozer feels unexpectedly sorry for the man. The same guilty regret he’d felt looking at the chain and the boat plucks once more at his veins.

The situation could almost be comical if not for everything else about it: here they are, two grown ranking men, squabbling like schoolboys over who's to blame. Little hasn’t even asked why Tozer has materialised, as though lost mutineers emerging from the fog is a commonplace occurrence. Perhaps it is. Or perhaps it’s just the least strange thing that Little has encountered of late. Tozer wouldn’t find it hard to believe.

The pity clears the thrum of adrenaline that’s sprung through his limbs at the appearance and aggression of Little. In its wake it leaves Tozer weary beyond belief. He slumps his shoulders and lets the strap of the rifle slide off, the gun clattering on the ground. “I’m not here to pick a scrap, Lieutenant.”

Oddly enough Little flinches. Tozer is confused for a moment before he remembers: tossing the gun aside. Stepping forward in peace, or an illusion of it. This time, of course, Tommy Armitage isn’t moving in quietly from behind but all the same Tozer is struck by the notion that he may not be on the back foot here. Little is alone. Again. Tozer could, if he wanted to, probably overpower the lieutenant. Little isn’t a small man but Tozer still has confidence in himself, even half-starved and injured as he is. It isn’t as though Little finds himself in much better circumstances. Little decidedly knows it, too. He is eying Tozer warily in the fashion of a man cornered.

The thought swells momentarily before bursting like a soap bubble. What then, after Tozer has beaten or killed the lieutenant? To find his way to whatever remains of Terror Camp that Little has come from, with some far-fetched explanation or outright demands? Christ, it all suddenly seems so ridiculous and petty. As if there isn’t enough working against them already.

Tozer makes an effort to relax further. He turns his empty palm outwards. “I know we didn’t part on the best of terms-”

“Oh, is that your opinion?”

Sarcasm doesn’t exactly suit Lieutenant Little. He’s much too straight-forward. Even as bedraggled as he is. Tozer ploughs on. “-an’ I can’t do anything about that, but I’m here now. Are you going to shoot me?”

For a moment he half thinks that Little might do just that. It looks like he’s having similar thoughts. His hands in their ragged gloves tighten on the stock of his rifle. Tozer tries not to quail.

But then the fight goes out of Little. As it so often does, Tozer thinks, somewhat uncharitably for being a man who very narrowly didn’t get shot.

“No,” Little admits. “I suppose not.” He keeps the barrel of his gun trained on Tozer, but he loosens his stance somewhat. “Where have you come from?”

Tozer gestures vaguely behind him. “I’m not quite sure. I’ve walked some way.”

“Alone?”

A loaded question. Tozer can hear the true inquiry behind it. Is this an attack?

“Alone,” he confirms, and watches Little relax a slight bit more.

“Ah. Well.”

“Where are you encamped?” Tozer finds himself curious. “And how many are you?” He wonders if Little keeps command. Him being out, alone, speaks volumes to what the role of the lieutenant has become among what remains of Franklin’s crew. Crozier gone, Hodgson dead- that left Little and Le Vesconte from _Erebus,_ if Tozer was keeping track correctly.

“You’ll see,” says Little grimly. “You might as well come along, then.” He bends to pick up Tozer’s dropped rifle -Tozer nearly opens his mouth to ask for it, but decides it isn’t worth the fight- and gestures for Tozer to start walking.

Tozer picks up his canvas sack where it had fallen when he had, and does. It’s the first direction he’s been given in a long time. He tries not to think about how comforted he feels to be told which way to walk, even if the telling is from a man who seems like as not to kill him. Ah well. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and if ever there had been a group of beggars-

“Have you ran off, then? Or are the others dead?’ Little asks, interrupting Tozer’s musing.

“Dead.”

“The creature?”

“Also dead.” He says nothing about the chain or Hickey’s final grand proclamation, delivered half-naked and his lips turning blue. Little doesn’t need to know, and Tozer doesn’t feel like telling.

They crest a hill and beyond it, Tozer can see a pathetic circle of tents, the sledged boat to the side, and a few men listing about a fire. He slows to a stop, and turns to Little, shocked. “Is this it?”

“This is it,” says Little shortly. “Expecting more?”

Yes. He had been. There had been more men- how long has it been since he’d been in this camp, for so many to have died since?

“Come on,” says Little again, not unkindly but not gently, either. He jostles Tozer and Tozer hisses in pain before he can stop himself. Little raises an eyebrow.

“I might need a bit of help,” Tozer says, reluctant to divulge this information for reasons he can’t quite justify to himself. The entire point of following the sledge tracks had been to find other people, after all.

He catches a few glances ranging from surprised to confused as they come into the camp, but mostly the stares are flat and uninterested. Tozer supposes the men have more pressing things to worry about than a lost-and-found marine. Even one who had once been nearly hanged for mutiny. Little seems to be of a similar opinion because he just takes Tozer through without stopping for any explanations, and brings them into a tent at the far end of the encampment.

It must be the officers’ tent despite it’s lack of the usual accoutrements: cots seem to have been disposed of, as well as any other furnishings, but Little puts down the few things he’s carrying with a care that seems to imply proprietorship, and there is a sheaf of singed papers that Tozer knows constitutes the remains of the maps after Hickey had finished with them. The guilt that has been steadily swelling in his stomach like a bad meal roils.

He glances around. “Lieutenant Le Vesconte?”

“Died a few days ago.” Little makes an aborted gesture that encompasses the entire tent. “And left me with this when he did. Not very thoughtful of him. _Did_ Hickey kill Captain Crozier?”

The sharp turn between the answer and the question doesn’t make much sense to Tozer, but Little seems to link the two.

“Hickey didn’t kill the captain. Neither did I. No one did.”

“Then where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“How helpful.”

Little’s sarcasm isn’t improving the more Tozer hears of it. “So that puts you in charge, then.”

“I suppose so.” Little doesn’t sound too pleased about it. He sets down Tozer’s rifle along with his own, carefully. He keeps his sidearm. Tozer tries not to watch the confiscated weapon too carefully. The last thing he needs is Little suspecting another attempt on the armoury, meagre as it is.

Rummaging from the odd collection of supplies Little extracts and opens the small chest that Tozer recognises as having once belonged to Harry Goodsir. Inside is a much depleted collection of bottles and a few silver instruments. It seems that the officers’ -or _officer’s_ \- quarters have become the impromptu medical tent as well.

“Might as well show me the damage,” says Little, gesturing to Tozer’s shoulder. After a moment of hesitation Tozer pushes the slops down to his waist, and lets Little untie the rope clumsily splinting his left arm.

“Good lord,” Little says, eyes wide as he takes in the sight. “How are- you’ve got to do something about this.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant, I’d figured that much,” Tozer grits out, eyes watering as Little shifts the shredded remains of his shirt to take a better look at the wound. “Is it to the bone? I thought I saw…”

“Can’t quite tell. There’s a lot of fluid building up here. This is- these are claw marks.”

“They are.” Tozer sees the next question on Little’s lips and heads it off. “We fought it. The creature. The- whatever it was called. Hickey thought he could control it. He was wrong. Crozier was there, we were together. Got hit on the back of the head and when I came back to it, the Captain was gone. Not dead, just gone.” He tries to offer consolation. “He could be alive. Everyone else, the rest of us, no one made it. He might have set back out like I did. He could be looking for you.”

“We’d have seen anyone passing,” says Little dolefully. “We’ve been watching.”

“I tried to free him- Hickey went mad- Little, he went mad and I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore.” Tozer’s voice goes vehement half-way through and he fights to keep the tremble out of it. He can’t afford to show weakness. _More_ weakness.

“You didn’t seem to have a problem with him before, and I’d say the man had always been mad.” Little’s voice is hard and unrelenting. “You heard him in the camp, at the hanging.”

Tozer doesn’t have much to say to that. He’s not about to admit to Little that he’d been Hickey’s man in a whole multitude of tangled ways. Somehow he doesn’t think _that_ explanation will win him much sympathy. “He’s dead now,” he says instead, and speaking the words out loud make it real in a way that it hadn’t been before. “The- bear killed him.”

“It did a decent job with you, too, from the looks of it. This has got to be cleaned or it’s sure to go septic.” Little scowls at Tozer. “Good thing then that your lot also saw fit to kidnap the only doctor.” He seems to realise what he’s said and his eyes go wide. “Oh God. Goodsir?” There’s a desperate question there, and Tozer hates himself just a little bit more when he has to shake his head. “I- sorry. He didn’t- no.”

“Damn,” says Little quietly, and then in a sudden fury, kicks out viciously at the ground, sending shale flying against the tent siding. “ _Damn!”_ He spins on Tozer and opens his mouth, vitriol gathering at his teeth- but then deflates.

It seems that the lieutenant simple doesn’t have the energy to haul him over the coals, as much as Tozer might deserve it. Little sighs instead, and scrapes filthy hands through his wild mop of hair. “Well. I’d say it’s justice then, that you’ll likely die without the doctor to help you, but the rest of us could have used Goodsir’s assistance just as much. So it doesn’t feel quite right.”

There isn’t really an answer that Tozer can give to that. He looks at the ground instead, and resists the urge to scuff his toe like a child caught misbehaving. The cold puffs of his breath ghost in front of his eyes.

“I don’t have anything for the pain that I can spare you,” Little takes up the thread of conversation again, and Tozer notes that the wording doesn’t preclude the existence of said substances, only their availability to him.

“Nothing’s broken, I don’t think. Just out of joint,” Tozer explains. “I’ve seen it happen before, watched one be put back in, too. I just need you to-”

Little takes his arm, bends it at the elbow, and rotates it sharply back. There’s a grinding _pop_ and a flash of blinding agony that makes Tozer gasp, and his arm slides back into position. “ _Fuck_!”

“I’ve seen Doctor MacDonald do it as well,” Little says unrepentantly. “How does that feel.”

“Jesus Christ, Lieutenant,” Tozer mutters, and stretches out his arm cautiously. The wound on his shoulder blade still hurts like hell and his upper arm feels bruised all over, but at least he can move the limb again.

“We’ll have to find something clean to bandage this with,” Little says, all business, and begins to rummage through the pathetic collection of medical supplies. He extracts a few strips of fabric that seem marginally less distasteful than the others, and turns his attentions to Tozer’s shoulder.

“Lieutenant?”

“Hm?” Little doesn’t take his eyes off his work, cutting the shirt away carefully. Tozer hisses as the cloth brushes at his exposed flesh.

“Not that I’m not grateful for the help, but why are you doing this?”

“You may be a traitorous dog,” says Little matter-of-factly, “and you should probably be hanged. But the captain’s dead. Or gone, as you seem to think. And the men are dying. And I am dying. And so, likely, are you. And you’re a good shot and a smart man, so I might as well make use of you.”

Tozer huffs out a breath that is almost a laugh. “That’s kind of you to say, sir, but what I meant was, why are _you_ the one getting your hands all covered in my mess? Not someone you could have do this for you?”

“Oh,” Little says in a strange tone, and yanks part of the shirt out from where it was sticking against Tozer’s exposed flesh with a bit too much force. Tozer yelps. Little ignores him. “You’ve come across us in a fairly republican state of affairs, I suppose. I’m taking over whatever duties need to be done, as everyone is. What else is to be done? When all are in the same boat. Although without the boat itself. That is rather the point.”

Little says nothing more, just lays bit of torn cloth across Tozer’s shoulder that are likely just as filthy as the shirt he’s cut away. Tozer doesn’t press further.

Despite Little’s statement, he does bring in another man to continue the work, and departs mumbling something vague about needing to attend to things elsewhere. Tozer is left with a painfully young deckhand from _Erebus_ whom he really only knows by sight. The boy had frequently hung around the gunroom with Bryant, chatting and rubbing shoulders with the marines there. Tozer tries not to think about Tommy as the sailor eyes his shoulder and threads a needle.

“This from that thing?” He sounds wary. “Is it dead, then?”

“Yes,” Tozer says, because he doesn’t want to spill out his lingering fears. Not in front of the men.

He’s taken briefly aback by how instantly he still thinks of them as _the men,_ his men in a way. He still automatically slips into a role of authority. All that should, by rights, be long behind him. Behind everyone, if Little is to be believed. It’s an unexpectedly souring thought. Not too long ago Tozer had been chafing against the chain of command like a dog with his collar too tight. He doesn’t- his grievances were legitimate. It wasn’t only Hickey with his fingers in pies and his voice in ears. Tozer had known what he was doing. More or less.

But some structure wouldn’t go amiss at the moment. The wide open lightness he’d felt trekking away from the wreckage of Hickey’s camp into the daylight is long, long gone. He feels every ache and pain in his bones and every lost thought he’s ever had in his head.

Once he’s been more or less patched and left alone Tozer hovers in the tent, uncertain.

He’s about to take a chance and find something to occupy himself with when Little pushes in through the flap. “Back in one piece?”

“More or less,” says Tozer cautiously.

Little looks at him. Tozer looks back. His wounds have been poked and prodded at. It’s time to prod at Little’s. “I saw the other camp,” he says, finally. “I saw Jopson.”

“Lieutenant Jopson,” corrects Little miserably. “Was he- dead?”

“I would have brought him along if he hadn’t been. What happened?” Tozer asks, watching him curiously. “After Hickey- after we- took the captain.”

Little looks at him from hollow eyes, their sockets gouged into his skeletal face. “Nothing good.” He doesn’t elaborate, but when Tozer thinks about the escalating series of _nothing good_ that had happened in Hickey’s camp, he doesn’t exactly blame Little for not wanting to go into detail.

“Yeah,” is what he says instead, “us neither.”

It’s an admission. Little stares at him for long enough that Tozer wants to fidget. But fidgeting had long been trained out of him. If he could stand for hours in the blazing sun in full dress uniform and not twitch, then he could hold up under the sunken gaze of a fading first lieutenant. He does his best to look past Little respectfully, as if under review.

“I know you didn’t kill Lieutenant Irving,” Little says, finally. Tozer startles. It isn’t what he had expected. He waits for Little to elaborate. Little does not. “I don’t know what Hickey told you for you to go along with him and I don’t care. If you can haul a boat and pitch a tent, you can stay.”

It isn’t much, but it is enough. Tozer tries not to let relief show too much on his face. He must not be too successful because Little’s mouth contorts into what could almost be called a smile. Or a grimace. “I did say before that I could use you. The men are too tired to build another gallows.” Really, he isn’t smiling at all. “And we may yet have better use for our bullets."

Tozer half-wonders if the only thing keeping him from truly breaking down is the knowledge that he had decided to leave Hickey at the end, even though the man had died not five minutes later. Following Crozier again had felt good. Snapping out instructions and putting the men into position, useless as it had been, had felt good. Having a plan that he knew of and made sense had felt good. Crozier throwing him the rifle, without question and with confidence, had felt _good._ And now-

Now he feels-

He wants to follow an order. He wants Little to point him in a direction and tell him _march._

So he does as Little says. He hauls. He pitches camp and disassembles it again, and when Little tells him to gather snow to melt into drinking water he does, and he doesn’t chafe at the tasks that were below a marine sergeant (at least not outwardly), and he is quiet. He doesn’t ask where they are going or why.

At night he still dreams of Collins being torn asunder, or of Heather laughing at some joke in the mess, with half his skull missing and his eyes taped shut. Once he wakes to see Lieutenant Irving standing in the corner of the tent he now shares with six other men, his officer’s coat hanging open, his chest and stomach a brutal mess of blood and flesh. Before Tozer can cry out Irving is gone, and he does not return.

In the end it only takes two days before Little gives Tozer his gun back. He presses the rifle into Tozer’s hands and tells him to make a round of the perimeter, and when he does Tozer lets out a breath he had been holding since he’d come across the camp. Half of him had been waiting for Little to enact _some_ sort of naval justice. Particularly after their last, less than reassuring conversation.

Little must notice something alter in his face because his own expression twitches and now Tozer could _swear_ that it was indeed a smile. “Duty owing, Sergeant,” is all Little says, and gives him a push. On his bad arm, which makes Tozer hiss and the lieutenant snort.

Not entirely forgiven, then. Tozer doesn’t mind. He takes to his work with a spring in his step for the first time since returning to the camp.

At the very least the men seem to have no trouble reaccepting him, though whether that’s down to generosity of spirit or simple weariness making it not worth the effort of holding a grudge, Tozer can’t say. He doesn’t poke at the issue, he merely quietly reintegrates himself into proceedings.

Little’s ominous pronouncement about the state of things hadn’t been an exaggeration: the lieutenant still nominally holds the reins, giving the order to pitch and break down camp, when to begin hauling and when to rest, keeping track of the rations and dictating which men will patrol and when. But Tozer has a sense for these sorts of things, and there is no authority at play. Little gives his commands based a great deal on what the collective tone of the crew is minutes from demanding- he is a voice, but not a hand.

In its own way, it is an important skill. Tozer finds himself approving of Little’s ability to know just when the men are on the verge of stopping of their own accord, and giving the order to halt just moments before it happens. Little isn’t a bad lieutenant, Tozer knows this. He cares about the men. And he’s given Tozer something to do that isn’t just letting his thoughts run in spirals, chasing his heels and nibbling at the back of his neck. The least Tozer can do is stand behind the lieutenant, and do as he’s told.

Doing what he’s told mostly consists of raising and lowering tents and keeping an eye on the camp. Tozer’d told Little that the creature was dead- and it _was_. It had to be. But he still feels better knowing that Little is maintaining watches, if diminished ones.

It’s while he’s on watch making a round of the camp that he sees it. A small seabird, investigating a discarded scrap of cloth with its beak. The bird is plump, and hops on short, feathery legs.

Tozer stills. For half a second he barely understands what he’s seeing: it’s been so long since their surroundings have been anything but dying men and ill-suited equipment spread across the rock that the bird seems unearthly. The clean white and grey plumage is well-preened and the small, beady black eyes are clear and bright. It seems strange to find the picture of rude health in an unremarkable, diminutive bird but compared to the men it is the very image of vitality. The bird is alive. The bird is life.

He reaches for his rifle.

Not fifteen seconds after the shot rings out Little comes careening into view, two men behind him. His coat is only half-buttoned and he’s clutching his gun. “What’s going on!” he bellows, eyes wide. “Tozer!”

Tozer just stays standing where he is, rifle gripped in white-knuckled hands. The full import of what has just happened starts to sink in. His shoulder is aching again from the force of the shot and he feels as though he may begin to cry. He cries so easily these days. Little skids to a stop next to him, looking about, presumably for the man or beast that he thinks Tozer has been shooting at. “What-”

“It’s alright. No danger. Just- look.” He points across the rock. A small, feathery shape is lying on the shale.

Little sucks in a breath. “My God.”

Tozer starts to laugh, and then is unable to stop. Little glances at him, and then Tozer is rewarded with a rare smile. It’s not a bad smile either. Little’s eyes crinkle at the corners and he looks centuries younger. He claps Tozer on the shoulder. “Sergeant,” he says, “may I congratulate you on bringing home dinner.”

The bird provides a soup thinner than paper and seasoned only with salt, and the most delicious thing that any of them have tasted in what feels like years. Soaked in it, even the rock-hard ship’s biscuits are near palatable. Tozer tries not to dwell on the fact that their numbers have dwindled to the point where one medium-sized fowl can provide for the entire company. He focuses instead on the way the meat feels between his rattling teeth and on his blistered tongue.

Some of the men want to crack open the bones for the marrow already, but Little stops them, insisting that they have to make it last. He doesn’t put words to what many are thinking: where there is one bird, there may be more. Perhaps he doesn’t want to raise false hopes. But Tozer goes to sleep that night and this time he dreams of a whole sky full of white and grey wings, and of shooting them down one by one until he is sunk into a sea of feathers.

The next evening is a different story. Tozer cannot sleep, and wanders the edges of their perimeter aimlessly in the half-darkness that is the best excuse the Arctic has for night at this time of the year. The thought of their recent meal is still a warm one, but at the same time it gnaws nervously at his mind. What if there are more birds out here, still. What if he falls asleep and they fly away to less hostile territory. He must be vigilant. He walks.

He comes across Little, smoking a pipe with jealous caution, away from the main circle of the camp. Tozer can’t blame him. They have precious little tobacco left. He hesitates on the edge of Little’s vision, uncertain if he’ll be welcome.

A glance in his direction and a raised eyebrow for his troubles. Little gestures to the ground beside him. “Come to keep me company?”

“If you like.” Tozer sits.

Little passes him the pipe. “Go on. You’ve earned it, past couple days.”

Tozer squints at him. “It was luck, Lieutenant. The bird was there, so was I. I wasn’t going to _not_ shoot it.” But he takes the pipe all the same and breathes in a lungful of warm smoke.

Little shrugs. “But it was still you who did it. How’s the shoulder?” he adds, a non-sequitur.

Tozer frowns and reaches up to rub at the body part in question. “Not better, but clean. Doesn’t smell septic. It looks like you’ll have me for a while longer.”

“Good.” Little takes back the pipe and silence falls between them for a moment. Tozer can feel his heart thrumming anxiously beneath the layers of canvas and wool he wears to protect it from the cold. “Next time I hear you boasting about being the best shot in the Royal Navy I won’t doubt it,” says Little with a sliver of a smile, hardly a smile at all, just a thin curve of apple peel that Tozer gobbles up all the same along with the praise.

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten all that you’ve done, because I haven’t,” Little speaks up again around the pipe stem, this time warningly. “But I won’t cut off my nose to spite my face either. You’re a useful man, Tozer. And I’m grateful to have you back on side.”

“Sir.” Tozer knuckles his forehead like a common sailor, feeling rather touched. He glances at Little. A few days ago he’d thought that Little wasn’t a poor officer, only an unassertive one. But it feels nice to have Little asserting _something_. Tozer still needs direction. After all, no one who’s come this far could truly be weak. Nothing weak lives out here.

They continue to walk. They find no more game. Tozer ceases to dream of birds and starts again to dream of Billy Gibson, his doleful eyes staring up at Tozer with passive accusation from the centre of a tremendous meat pie.

They also bury two more men, although _bury_ implied a more dignified place of rest than the reality, which is that the bodies were covered in stones as best as could be done, and left behind.

The day following those deaths is the worst that Tozer can remember. They stumble and fall and the sledges hardly move at all, the air is so cold it’s hard to breathe and Tozer’s eyes water from the brightness of the sun, only for the tears to freeze at the corners of his eyes, tiny glittering crystals at the edges of his vision.

After two -three? One? Four?- hours Little gives the order to stop, and Tozer limps over to him on aching feet.

“Lieutenant,” he begins, but when Little looks up he falls silent.

“I know.” Little grimaces. “You don’t need to say it. I know.”

Tozer reaches out hesitantly. Puts a hand on Little’s upper arm. “I’ll have the men pitch camp. See if we can’t get a fire started.”

“If you would.”

It doesn’t take as much prodding to get the camp set up. Not because of any improvement in morale or health among the men, but rather the opposite: they are too weary to think about protesting. They operate like automatons performing the motions expected of them. Automatons with rusty joints and creaking hinges. All Tozer has to do is wind the key and step back.

He casts an eye over the scene, the men listing blank-eyed against the boats or still struggling to pitch the tents that in more capable times they could have assembled in their sleep. But a shallow pit has been scraped out for a fire, and few men are determinedly striking flint and coaxing shreds of oakum and paper into a small but well-meaning blaze. Not all is at the very end of whatever rope might still exist. Tozer nods approvingly. He makes sure that the correct allotment of tins for the evening’s meal is set out and no more, and goes to find Little. It’s unlikely in a way, that these days Little is his first choice of companion. They might be on cordial terms but there is still a terrible lot of prickly baggage lurking just beneath the surface of their pleasantries, like a reef by the mouth of a welcoming harbour. Or an iceberg stretching out much wider than is betrayed by its innocent peak above the waves. Navigation must be painstaking and cautious in a way that it might not have been among the rest of the men. But then again, as a marine Tozer had always been drilled into seeing himself as an extension of officer country rather than one of the ABs. A soldier among sailors, caught half-way between the two worlds that hovered about each other onboard ship. He looks for Little.

He finds the lieutenant a little ways outside of the wobbly boundary of the camp, staring with seemingly great intent at a rock on the ground that looks exactly like the other ten thousand that they’ve trod over on this interminable trek.

Little has always cut a bit of a gloomy figure. He’s perfectly pleasant and Tozer had seen him frequently laughing and smiling with the other lieutenants aboard _Terror,_ but more often than not the man had been quiet and solemn. He wonders now if the predisposition towards melancholy had slid treacherously down into something deeper out here on the ice. Little looks desperately sad. But today had been a truly rotten one. To the core.

“Lieutenant.”

Little nods at him in distracted acknowledgement.

“All well?”

For some reason that gets a vehement, unamused laugh. “ _Don’t_ say that.”

Uncertain which one of Little’s myriad, confusing boundaries he’s trod over this time, Tozer backtracks. “I mean- seems something’s on your mind. You know I’ve got two ears. Is it the men? You’re doing the best you can for them.”

“For all the good it does.”

“Better than nothing,” Tozer offers uncertainly. He’s a marine sergeant. He’s used to bucking up frightened kids, or flattering and bullying old men. He doesn’t know what to do with Little’s flat misery.

“It was all bad choices versus bad choices, and now it seems nothing’s mattered at all. I could have done anything, and we’d still have wound up here.”

“Can’t be certain of that.”

“I can’t be certain of anything. But that doesn’t stop the decisions from being poor ones.”

Tozer glances at him. “Something…particular on your mind?”

For a moment he thinks he’ll be rebuffed. But then Little meets his eye a bit helplessly and gives in. “You said. When you first came here. You said you’d seen the camp- the tents. With Jopson, and those other fellows.”

Ah. Yes. “I did.”

“I can’t stop thinking about them.”

“Lots of men have died,” Tozer offers hesitantly. “Doesn’t make their loss any less regrettable, but doesn’t make it any _more,_ either.” He’s not sure he believes that himself. It’s the sort of platitude he might offer his men. Meaningless, but perhaps cheering. Lots of bullets whizzing about up here, lads, but none of ‘em have hit you yet. Lots of blood on the ground, but not enough of it yours to put you in a box. Yet.

“I didn’t kill lots of men,” Little says, “I only killed some of them.” And _hell_ but Tozer has no idea how to respond to _that._

“You- you didn’t kill those men, Lieutenant.” He has an unsettling vision of Little clutching a knife, looking oddly like Hickey. He blinks it away. “I don’t know what happened but I know that- Christ, you’re not blaming yourself for _scurvy_ now, are you?”

Little shakes his head impatiently. “No- it’s. It’s not that.”

“Then what?” Tozer is nonplussed.

“I left them,” Little says, dully. “I let myself be persuaded. I’m no lieutenant anymore, and I have as much to regret as you do.” He turns away. “I’ve been a hypocrite, to be truthful.”

“You’re too hard on yourself.” His own words take Tozer by surprise. And more so, the fact that he means them. “These aren’t the times to measure your- your soul, Lieutenant. You did what you had to.”

“I didn’t have to, though. That is my point,” Little argues. “I should have held strong.”

“It isn’t easy. To hold strong.” Tozer looks away, the familiar sour flavour of shame sticking hot in his throat. “You tell yourself all about who you are and the laws you stick to. And then you find that you’re much more fond of living than you are upholding whatever morals you’ve sworn to in softer times.”

He can feel Little’s gaze upon him, knows that Little is well aware that Tozer isn’t speaking in hypotheticals.

“I do regret as, as well. A lot of things. I do. So I know.” He says it as though he’s trying to convince himself. But he knows. God, does he know. The regret burns at his throat every night when he lies down to go to sleep, like bile rising from his empty, cringing stomach. Tozer doesn’t want to plead, but he feels he has to. He maintains eye contact with Little, not because he’s brave but because if he lets his vision drift he’s certain that Gibson will be standing in the corner of the tent again, just where he had been the night before, and Tozer can’t bear to face him. He hadn’t seen Gibson’s corpse before Goodsir had butchered him, but in Tozer’s dreams he is always as punched through as Irving had been, his beard matted with blood.

“You know,” he starts- then he doubts, but what use is doubt when they’re all stuck here anyways, he reasons with himself. He breathes. “You know, I wanted you to- to give me a direction. When I found you.”

“A direction?”

“An order, Lieutenant. A duty, a rank, a command. It was the only thing I could think might help me.” Tozer can’t look at Little. It’s shameful to admit, even though if there is a place beyond shame, they have certainly found it. “Like you could forgive me and let me be a marine again.”

Little frowns. “That’s something beyond my power. I’m not to one to look to for absolution, or whatever it is you need.”

“That’s not the way I see it.” Tozer forces himself to look up from the scuffed toes of his boots. “And it did help.” He can’t believe that Little would think his station so easily dissolved. He doesn’t want to believe it, either. No matter what Little says, Tozer needs him to be the first lieutenant, so that Tozer can be the sergeant. Otherwise he’s just a mutineer and a coward.

Little bobs his head in a fumbling, uncertain gesture of acknowledgment. “Well. Ah. There’s that at least.” They both fret in a moment of increasingly awkward silence in which Tozer puzzles through what exactly could have possessed him to say _anything_ until Little stands with a wince. “Well,” he says again, “I’m turning in.” He stops, stuttering. “Thank you for talking to me. For telling me. It can be difficult to be so alone, out here. Try and get some sleep, Tozer.”

Little still sleeps alone in his own tent, the sole officer left. Tozer assumes that Le Vesconte shared with him, until he didn’t. He himself had crept in with a few of the men, and no one had remarked upon it. Too cold, too tired, too numb to raise a fuss about a some-time mutineer curled against the backs of those he had sought to abandon. But Little, loyal to the last, is left to his solitude. It doesn’t seem right. Tozer had thought of Little as standing apart, but he more than anyone should be in the fold.

“Why do you do that?” Tozer asks, before he can overthink what he is saying.

“Do what?”

“Sleep alone, even now. It can get cold.” Tozer knows this well. “You shouldn’t need to keep to your own tent.”

Little frowns. “I know it seems foolish to cling to the ranks. But even at the very end of everything, there is still a distance there. The men- they’ve all got their mates to share with. I would only be intruding.”

Tozer is quiet a moment. He thinks of the six men in his adopted tent, breathing out from lungs that are shallow but still warmer than empty air. “I could share with you,” he offers at last. “If you wouldn’t mind, if you’re cold.”

Little’s expression goes strange, and Tozer immediately wants to take his words back. Bury them deep in the frozen earth. Just because he holds no ill-will towards Little doesn’t mean that the opposite is true. After all, Little had never mutinied against Tozer’s lot, or had him clubbed over the head with a gun stock.

“Would you?” Little says before Tozer can start babbling excuses and rationalisations like a child caught stealing. “I’d be much obliged.”

“’Course,” Tozer says before he can think better of it. “I’ve got no grievance against you.” He’s not attached to his current spot in any particular way. Once he had shared a tent with his marines, and had never slept so well. Now he’s hard-pressed to name even one of the men he lies down with to curl up under the blankets. He thinks most of them are from _Erebus,_ if that even still means anything.

Little fixes him with an unreadable look, although that may be partially down to the wild tangle of facial hair that now obscures more than half his face. “Very well then.”

They walk in silence back to Little’s lonely tent, Tozer making a detour to the one he’s been spending his nights in to fetch his few possessions. They spread out Tozer’s thin blanket in the hope that the double layer of fabric will offer some relief from the sharp, jutting shale before crawling into the canvas sack that is Little’s. Tozer feels odd getting in so close to the man, not because of the act itself -he’s shared a bag with Tommy before and, of course, Cornelius- but because it’s _Lieutenant Little,_ and that is still some strange breach of custom and courtesy that Tozer can’t quite wrap his head around. But Little shifts over easily to accommodate him in the tight space, and steadily the air between them becomes markedly warmer and the space more welcoming, just as it had with others, and so Tozer doesn’t dwell on the lingering discomfort.

He hauls up the covers and settles in as best he can.

He has to physically restrain himself from pressing into Little. He wants Little to wrap his arms around his shoulders, hold him close and remind him that they’re both still alive. Tozer has never functioned well as an isolated unit.

And that _certainly_ has led him into some idiot decisions in the past, now hasn’t it.

This one doesn’t feel as foolhardy as some, but Tozer has since begun to distrust his own judgement, especially while he is aching to be touched and grounded and reminded that he is real.

He pushes his thoughts away, and forces himself to sleep. Despite everything it comes blessedly quickly and even more thankfully, he dreams of nothing.

Tozer wakes warmer than he’s been in a long time. He’s wrapped around a small furnace, and it takes him a minute to realise that it’s Lieutenant Little. It takes him only another heartbeat after that to realise that Little is also awake, and simply hasn’t made a move to vacate Tozer’s presence. He’s lying on his back, his head tucked against Tozer’s shoulder and his hand resting lightly on his chest, just below where Tozer has flung his arm.

“Sorry,” Tozer starts, and begins to delicately extract himself from around the lieutenant.

“No need to apologise,” Little waves him off. “It’s too cold to stand on ceremony.” He snorts. “We’re already two men in a single bag, this isn’t much more of an imposition. And you’re warm.” He coughs, and looks slightly embarrassed to have added the last. Tozer doesn’t remark upon it.

Tozer clears his own throat. “Well. Up and about, I suppose.”

“Oh, why bother? What schedule do we keep here?” Little says with a slight laugh which devolves into a cough halfway through. “If we slept the day away, I doubt anyone would take notice. Or think anything of it other than we were two more men dying and unable to rouse themselves.”

“But we’re not dying,” Tozer disagrees. “And if we were, they’d come looking for you. You’re the lieutenant.”

“For all that might mean. I’ve already confessed to you the hollowness of _that_ title.”

Tozer gives Little a gentle shake. “It carries weight and you know it. Now come on. No doubt there’s something to be done that isn’t just lying here feeling sorry for ourselves.”

“Well, when you put it that way.” Little doesn’t sound convinced. But he pushes the blankets aside and reaches for his boots.

It feels comfortable, as they move around each other in their meagre morning preparations, pulling on layers and switching out dirty woollen socks for pairs of other, equally dirty woollen socks. It’s a routine of sorts. Tozer likes routine. He glances sideways at Little winding his muffler around his neck, and can’t help but grin.

“You know, Lieutenant, you ought to have a shave,” Tozer teases, already feeling emboldened by the natural intimacy of sharing a space. “I’m hardly able to discern you under all that.”

“Ha ha,” Little intones, tucking the end of the muffler into his collar. “It’s practical. It’s warmth.” He runs a hand over the veritable mane ringing his cheeks. “It could use a trim, perhaps.”

“I’ve not got a razor but I’ve a little pair of scissors you might use,” Tozer offers, and before he can think the better of it, adds, “I could even do it for you. Without a mirror things could be tricky.”

Little looks at him, and Tozer winces. He’s being an idiot, forgetting that he and Little aren’t brothers in arms, not really. This isn’t as it had been back on _Terror_. Tozer had shaved more of his marines than he could remember, and been shaved in turn. They could have always gone to the stewards for that sort of thing, but it had always felt better to let a man you knew and trusted hold the blade up to your throat.

It is decidedly not a job left to a man who had committed the cardinal sin of mutiny to go off chasing a half-crazed caulker’s mate across the ice before crawling back with his tail between his legs.

“Oh, why not?” Little says, surprising Tozer and, seemingly, surprising himself as well. “Might as well keep busy somehow.”

“There you go,” says Tozer, a tentative happiness bubbling low in his stomach. It’s been a while since he could do something simple like this for someone else. “Knew you’d come ‘round to my way of thinking.”

He digs about in his things for the little pair of scissors he’s carried with him since Greenhithe. The metal is cold at the tips of his fingers, and he flexes them to shake out the stiffness before touching the wiry mess of hair on Little’s face.

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave enough so that your face doesn’t freeze.” His own beard has been a blessing in that regard.

“I’m more concerned that you’ll leave me looking ridiculous.” Little peers cross-eyed at Tozer’s fingers, threading through the beard at his chin.

Tozer affects an aggrieved air. “Please. I used to cut all the lads’ hair. I know what I’m doing.”

“The lads? They’ll be the marines I used to see, going about mostly bald?”

It’s nice to see Little in good humour. It’s easy to forget that he had been light-hearted once at the beginning of their voyage. He grins and lets Little chuckle at his own joke while he starts to trim. He cleans up the beard on Little’s chin and on his cheeks, and then smooths out the worst of the tangles, cutting away where he has to. There are little curls that have fallen below Little’s ears, far longer than a man like Little would likely ever wear under ordinary circumstances, but Tozer doesn’t touch them. He rather likes the way it looks.

“There you go.” He steps back, checking that he’s done a more or less even job on both sides of Little’s face before nodding in approval. “Back to your handsome self, Lieutenant.”

“Let’s not go too far.” But Tozer can detect a faint blush on Little’s face. He looks pleased, and lifts a hand to feel out the new edges of his hair. “Thank you.”

“No trouble at all.” If anything, it had been Little doing him a favour. There’s an easy comfort in taking care of someone that Tozer enjoys. A tiny splinter of normality.

He swims out of heavy sleep the next morning aware that he’s half-hard in his trousers. He hasn’t woken with an erection in weeks, his body most likely far too busy trying to keep itself from collapsing to have the resources required for passive arousal. But the warm, close body of Little breathing calmly beside him, the press of his arm against Tozer’s side, is stirring his thinning blood. It’s about as pleasant as anything can be here, hazy and relatively snug. Tozer can let his eyes drift back closed, and imagine he’s back in England, in his narrow bunk in the marine barracks by the docks, or perhaps closeted away in some plush establishment, willing company by his side. Any moment now he’ll be sent packing with a kiss and a friendly smack.

But he’s not in England, he’s in the Arctic, and he’s not in a bunk or a bed, but trying to ignore the hard shale digging into his back and doing his level best to find warmth under threadbare blankets. And the body beside him isn’t a girl -or a boy, Tozer allows, thinking on his rather mixed bag of personal history- who’s likely to offer him a friendly rub before kicking him out the door.

But.

It isn’t the most unexpected thing in the world.

He has always been tactile, a creature of touch. He communicates with a hand on the shoulder, a clap on the back. Taking a man by the arm and dragging him to where he needs to be, or showing approval with an easy embrace. That kind of physical comfort had been easy to come by with his men and onboard _Terror_ Tozer had never wanted for anything. Even while trekking he had slept in the marines’ tent with men at his back and his front, close and breathing and within reach.

It had been a world of difference after the mutiny. Hickey had withdrawn, and Tozer had been set adrift. He hasn’t had the simple trust of touch in so long. Small wonder that with Little permitting even this practical measure, Tozer finds himself bending to it like a compass needle spinning towards magnetic north.

But even compasses can’t be trusted here, not with the pole meandering about like a drunkard trying to stumble back home. He resolves to be more cautious, and the next night sleeps fitfully.

It has been following him all these wretched miles, Tozer knows. It catches up to him now, when the camp wakes to find one of the men dead in the night, face peaceful as though he hadn’t suffered despite the terrible swollen joints and blotchy dark stains across his pallid skin, and the question is raised before the sun has even peaked in its shallow track. Tozer doesn’t know which of the men put voice to the thought. Perhaps all of them had at once, breathed it into being with sour tongues and shrivelled stomachs. All he knows is that he is sat on their shared bedroll pulling on his boots when Little pushes through the tent flap, expression twisted in a way that makes Tozer sit up. “What’s happened.”

“James Walker. He’s dead.”

Tozer had known James Walker. He had served on _Terror._ He had played the harmonica. He heaves himself to his feet. “I’ll get some of the lads together, have the man made tidy outside camp.”

“That’s the other thing.”

“The other thing?”

“The men, they-” Little swallows. Hard. “There are questions in the camp. Why bury Walker. Why not use him instead.”

It takes a moment for his sluggish brain to process the words, and when their meaning hits Tozer’s eyes go wide. “What? No. Have they actually asked this? Put the question to you?”

Little’s face is wry for a moment. “It wasn’t so much a question as it was a courtesy that they were informing me at all.”

“No.” Tozer’s mind is recoiling. He can smell Billy again, taste the stringy meat between his rattling teeth. “Lieutenant, you can’t allow this.”

“They want to eat, Sergeant.”

“We all want to eat.”

“And so perhaps we should.” Little turns away. “I can’t tell you I like it, it’s against everything that I know and believe to be- but for God’s sake, Tozer. They are _hungry._ ”

Tozer lurches forward, desperate, clutches at Little’s shoulder. “Please, Lieutenant.” The dream about Billy hovers at the edge of his vision, those ghastly eyes. That mouth-watering smell. He hasn’t dreamed about Billy since he’d moved in to Little’s tent. He would rather that state of affairs not change. “It’s not right.”

“Of course it isn’t right!” Little snaps, twisting away. “But it’s necessary. You think I _want_ this?” He catches sight of Tozer’s face and his expression softens. “Tozer?”

Tozer doesn’t know what he looks like but it can’t be good. He begins to shrink back in on himself, searching for the meagre warmth in his core and wanting to extract himself from this conversation, from this situation. He speaks instead. “I don’t think that, Lieutenant. But we, ah, hm. I can’t- again. Not again.”

“You can’t- _oh.”_ Tozer cringes from Little’s comprehension. “Oh.”

“We- he. Hickey- it was-” The words stick in his throat as Billy had not. Billy had gone down easy. Blessedly so. Tozer can still taste that on his tongue. It had been delicious then. Now it feels as though he’s choking on it. On Billy’s hollow stare and reproachful inevitability.

“Who,” asks Little, tentatively.

“Gibson. He died.” _And how did he do that,_ murmurs a little voice in Tozer’s head, the voice that presumably belongs to the man who had noticed the knife in Cornelius’s hand that day, stalking back into the tent where Goodsir kept his bitter meditations and where Billy had been spending more time than not, unable to haul or carry or hardly walk his own spindly form across the shale. “He was in a bad way from the time we left.”

Little nods, accepting it. And of course he accepts it. Gibson had been dying. So many men had been dying. There is no reason for him to believe that the process had been expedited in any way.

Tozer doesn’t make mention of Goodsir. He hadn’t eaten that meal. Only ever the one, only ever Billy. Surely that must count for something in the ongoing war for his soul, even if it had been mostly unintentional. The thought that Cornelius might have actually done him a favour by beating him unconscious that day almost makes a laugh bubble up in Tozer’s dry throat.

“We’re at the end here,” Little says. “You and I both know we aren’t going any further.” He rubs the heels of his hands against his eyes, and when he looks up the faint imprints of his woollen gloves spiderweb across the hollow of his brow. “There is no command here. There is nothing. And if I try to stop the men from eating now I do believe they will shoot me.”

“I wouldn’t let them,” says Tozer simply.

Little looks up quickly, blinking. “I thank you for the support, but I’d rather it not come to that. There’s no choice, really. The man is already dead.” His expression goes wry for a moment. “I still can’t think it right, but- well. It is traditional. We are sailors, despite the current lack of sailing. And if his body can sustain his mates even for just a little longer…perhaps judgement will be reserved.”

 _At least he wasn’t killed for the purpose,_ Tozer thinks, and once more remembers Cornelius sweeping out of the tent, that terrible knife in hand, and the meal that had followed. Goodsir with blood all down his front and his eyes like two chips of frozen shale. He doesn’t think he could tell Little that even if he wanted to.

What’s worst is that even after all his protests and guilt and confessions, the smell of James Walker charring over the fire still makes his mouth water and his stomach rumble. Tozer retreats to the tent, but nothing can keep out that smell.

Little joins him after none too long, and stands silently for a moment before sitting down. “Will you not eat?”

Tozer shakes his head wordlessly.

“Tozer…”

“I can’t.”

Little sits beside him. “I won’t make you. But I wish you would.”

“So little care for the state of my immortal soul, Lieutenant?” In lighter times it might have sounded like a joke. Now Tozer hears how plaintive he sounds and winces.

“Too much care for the state of your stomach, I think.” Little frowns. “You’ve proved yourself a good man, Tozer. The rules are different when there is no choice.”

A good man. Could that really be what Little thinks of him? There’s so much he doesn’t know, and that Tozer won’t tell him. He also won’t tell Little that he _knows_ that the rules are different. The rules are worse. He knows what he’d seen, with Collins. “The tins are still enough for me. I haven’t started bleeding anywhere I wouldn’t expect.”

“For now. I’ll not have you falling. Even if the means are…unsavoury.”

But isn’t that just the problem, Tozer thinks near hysterically. He’s always known the stories, of course. No man who sets himself on a course out to sea is ignorant of what might happen in times of wreck and ruin. _Traditional,_ Little said. But there are no stories about the souls of men being swallowed up into nothingness, and no assurance that a man eating his comrades might not be doing the very same. And there are no stories about how the scent of cooking meat might linger on the back of the tongue, greasy and melting like the best thing Tozer has ever smelled, layering over the sick fear swelling in his throat.

No, _unsavoury_ isn’t the issue at all.

In the end, even the extra meat can’t make a difference. It has been- a day? Two? Three? No. Not more than two. Not more than two days in which nothing has happened, nothing has changed. Those still alive lie in their tents, staring at nothing. The remaining tins are opened with knives and the contents scraped out with bony fingers. Tozer keeps himself moving about because it’s the only thing he still can do. He goes out and digs in the rock, looking for something, anything. Lichen or dead twigs indicating plants. Excrement indicating animals. Any trace of life beyond that which is slowly petering out in the halted, failing camp.

He returns from another such fruitless search and enters the tent to find Little sitting on the ground, staring at something in his hand. He doesn’t turn when Tozer pushes through the flap and so Tozer approaches.

“Have you wondered if we will ever be found?” Little asks without preamble. “I mean, the remains of this camp. If anybody will know who we were or if this expedition will be completely lost to time, as we are lost to the ice now?”

“Who’s this anybody you’re talking about? The Hudson Bay Company? Help from England?” Tozer asks, crouching beside him. Little is holding his pocket watch, the gold chain carefully coiled in his palm. The watch is still ticking, and presumably shows the correct time or something close to it. Whatever that means now, here. But Little winds it each morning. Tozer has seen him do it.

“No, I mean far from now. Little still doesn’t look up. “Ten years, fifty years, a hundred. Perhaps someone will find our bodies and realise: these were Franklin’s men, this was Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic. What will they think of us, I wonder?”

“We’re not bodies just yet, Edward,” Tozer says as gently as he can manage, before remembering that the last time he had used Little’s given name, the man had gone down with a crack on the head and Tozer had only barely slipped a noose.

Little seems to remember that fact as well, because then he does look up and give Tozer a feeble smile. “No, we’re not.” He stands, tucking the watch and chain back into his pocket. Tozer rises with him, and it’s as he does that he notices a streak of blood running from Little’s hairline down his temple.

Trancelike, he reaches out and swipes it away. They both stare at the dark rusty smear on his thumb, and Little raises a hand to touch where Tozer just had.

It also comes away bloody. “Ah,” says Little distantly. “I- I believe the appropriate phrase here is, _speak of the devil_ , but judging from everything else, he may have been here for some time already.” He clears his throat. “I am surprised it’s taken so long to get to this point.”

“It’s not so bad,” Tozer cautions, rubbing the blood off on his trousers. “It’s only to be expected. But you still look fine to me.”

It’s like Little hasn’t heard him. “But it’s strange, I almost feel- it’s almost a relief. To know. There’s always been a clock, but now I can see more clearly what time it reads.”

It takes a second to understand what Little means, and then it clicks. “Fuck- _that_ ,” says Tozer, surprised at how furious he feels, “you can’t- you can’t be talking like that.”

“Talking- telling the truth?” Little challenges, glaring back. “We’re all dying, Tozer. All this tells me is that I might die of scurvy before starvation. What difference does that make?”

“You don’t know that!”

Little scoffs. “So you’ve watched all these men falling around us and still somehow believe the rest of us are immune? You’ve been misguided in the past, but this is treading into idiocy in a way I hadn’t expected from you, Sergeant. I thought we had agreed we’re likely to make this spot here our last.”

“Keep your voice down,” Tozer hisses. “they can hear us outside.”

“As though they don’t already know! They’re dying, Tozer!”

“That’s- that’s not the point- it’s about appearances!”

Little makes an exaggerated show of looking about them. “ _Appearances?_ ”

“You know what I mean.”

“I wouldn’t have expected you to cling to desperately to decorum, Tozer. Hierarchy and the way things are done- seeing as you used to be so eager to leave it all behind!”

“That was different!”

“Was it now!” Little is actually shouting, leaning forward into Tozer’s space angrily and Tozer instinctively jerks back, nearly stumbling. “And _how_ was it different?”

“I didn’t, it wasn’t, I wasn’t giving up! I thought it was the best way forward, the best way to survive. That’s not the same!” Tozer needs Little to be better. Not do better- there isn’t really anything left _to_ do at this point, but if Little is crumbling beside him there will be no one for Tozer to be a marine for. He will surely vanish against the constant white landscape if that happens again. And Little can’t die. Little can’t leave him. Tozer doesn’t want to be alone. A queasy kind of fury surges up the back of his throat. Acrid bile bites at his tongue. Damn Little, and damn his uncertainty. Tozer is a marine. He can’t steer the ship, he can only protect it. It’s Little who should be at the helm, steadfast and reliable. But he isn’t. “You have to want to live. Don’t tell me you’re ready to die. Don’t tell me that.”

“No, I don’t want to die,” Little says, his voice terrible. “I want to go _home_ , and not be cold and hungry and damnable- _here-_ ”

“But you are here,” Tozer spits. “And I can’t change that, you can’t- figure out what to do! What should we _do!_ You have to know, or what- what kind of a lieutenant are you-”

“I never claimed,” Little says horribly, voice shredding to pieces like oakum in the hands of a boy, “to know what to do. You know that- you’ve always known that. Would you have gambled cracking me over the skull otherwise? Don’t ask me for answers, Tozer, not when you were the one setting fire to solutions long before any of this.”

Guilt spikes, swift and sharp. What’s the sense of feeling guilty when there’s nothing to be done in way of reparation- nothing to be done but the guilt itself, perhaps. A painful gulp of silence follows Little’s accusation. “Lieutenant-”

“Don’t.” Little snaps.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t try and have me not be furious with you. I am furious with you.”

“Alright.” Tozer says, catching his breath. His lungs feel shallow these days, incapable of pulling enough oxygen from the Arctic expanse for some reason. “I’m sorry.”

Little presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “That doesn’t help.” His voice is muffled and Tozer can no longer pretend that he can’t hear how the words shake. He reaches a tentative hand out to Little’s shoulder, and then lowers himself quickly when Little practically collapses, legs folding beneath him to kneel at the ragged edge of the blanket.

“You told me you were looking for direction.” Little sounds far away.

Tozer nods. “I still am. Even if you told me you couldn’t give it.”

“I almost think I took you back for the same reason. If I could give you a command, I was _in_ command. And what else was I? But it still means nothing.”

“It means something to me.” It hadn’t occurred to Tozer that perhaps they were passing each other in both directions. If a lieutenant’s command could make a marine, perhaps a marine’s action could make a lieutenant. It’s a curious thought, that he might hold as much sway over Little as Little does over him. Maybe they’re both just clinging to each other, trying to prevent themselves from scattering to bits and pieces across the icy landscape like all the rest of the discarded debris cast off in the wake of the ever-shrinking camp.

“When you first reappeared I thought you were here for a fight,” Little’s voice is steadier but there’s still a hitch in his breathing. “But then I thought, we’ve been fighting on all fronts for so long. And there was no sense in holding my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I gave you your rifle back still rather doubting your intentions. But what could you have done to us, truly? That hadn’t already been done?”

“That’s still a defeatist attitude to take, Lieutenant,” Tozer says hoarsely. “We’ll have to work on that.” He’s trapped by Little’s eyes. Dark pupils, dark irises, dark circles underneath. Close enough that if he shifted forward just slightly, their noses would touch.

Little looks back at him. Tozer can feel his breath on his own lips. It’s warm.

“Little,” he says, searching for something to say that will hide what he wants, because he hasn’t been touched in far too long. Even Hickey near the end had been distant, caught up in some grand plan that only he could see. And Tozer hasn’t felt _close_ to anyone the way he feels close to Little now, not since they’d left the ships. If he missteps now…he can’t go back to sleeping alone. That will kill him as surely as anything else.

But Little surprises him. “Tozer,” he says, and reaches out cautiously to take Tozer’s wrist.

Tozer glances between them and then quickly back to Little’s gaze. There is a hesitancy there but Tozer thinks- he’s good at judging these things, he has to be, to live as he had done in the Navy, and perhaps- he places his other hand on top of Little’s. Perhaps his compass isn't as deceptive as he'd thought. “If you were thinking of asking,” he says, “I would probably say yes.”

“Oh,” breathes Little, eyes wide. And then, “Probably?”

Tozer decides that further talk isn’t the best way forward. He has always been a man of action, not words. So he kisses Little instead.

Their noses are both cold when they bump together, and Tozer’s lips are as cracked and dry as Little’s are. He can tell that he is kissing Little with far too much desperation, but there isn’t a power on Earth that can currently bring him to care. Not when Little has opened his mouth with just as much eagerness, and has his fingers twisted tightly into the front of Tozer’s shirt.

“God-”

It’s hungry. They are hungry, for heat and comfort as much as for food and home. There’s a ghost of warmth on Little’s breath and Tozer _craves_ it, pressing forward and reaching with frigid fingers towards someone who is reaching back, finally reaching back.

They pull apart and Tozer closes his eyes, leans his forehead against Little’s own and just breathes. Little says nothing but he doesn’t move away either, which Tozer can only take as a good sign.

Little is still half-kneeling, half-sitting on the ground, one leg bent uncomfortably beneath him. “Come on,” Tozer murmurs and pulls him forward so they can both shuffle sideways onto the blankets proper. He kisses Little again, easing him down with a hand at the back of Little’s neck.

The motions are so familiar, almost ridiculously so in these circumstances, and a tiny bubble of happiness is swelling giddily in Tozer’s chest as he props himself up on his good arm and grins down at Little. “Alright?”

“Very much so,” says Little, eyes wide. “But Tozer, I’ve not- I’ve never-” He’s stammering, and Tozer is charmed. He strokes Little’s side, lets his fingers play over the cold buttons of Little’s coat. Now that he’s started touching and being touched he cannot stop. It will kill him to stop.

He has been telling Little the truth all along: he wants direction. He had been proud of his position, to lead his men and keep them safe and to do what was asked of him by a command structure that he had trusted once upon a time. And then he had done what Cornelius asked of him for so long. It had been easy to just allow himself to be directed at whatever problem Cornelius had needed to be solved. But in another way, it had been very difficult indeed. He wandered his way to Little still wanting to be asked and told. He’s needed it.

Now it seems as though Little doesn’t know what it is he wants. So Tozer steps into control with ease.

“I have. Just try not to overthink it much.” It might be strange that he even wants to touch: both of them are filthy and sick but it seems that a warm body is still a warm body. And, well- Tozer rather likes Little, to be fair.

So he spits into his hand and uses the slickness to give Little a good stroke from root to tip. Little is only half-hard but Tozer doubts anyone’s blood is flowing quickly these days. He strokes Little again, listening to the man’s breathing grow quick.

“Just let me know how you like it and I’ll take care of the rest.” Tozer has had experience of this sort before. It’s just what happens at sea. And apparently while trekking endlessly cross land.

He sees a familiar flash of shame cross Little’s face and ignores it. He’s not here deal with a crisis. _Another_ crisis. They’ve got enough on their hands. If Little wants to bluster about the sort of man he is, he can do it later, after Tozer’s finished. In any case it’s unhealthy to stop in the middle of taking pleasure. It does strange things to the body. Everyone knows that.

Little had been handsome, before scurvy and poison and starvation and cold. He still has a straight, strong nose and nice dark eyes, but his skin is sallow and chapped, and there is blood on his gums that Tozer can taste when they kiss. “Edward,” he says, and enjoys the sound of it. “Edward.”

“Yes- ?”

“Jus’ like saying it.”

He is careful with his kisses. Gentle as he strokes Little, nothing hasty or hurried. Tozer doesn’t mind. He’s always liked kissing.

“Tozer-” Little is breathless. It makes something in Tozer feel warm just to hear that. “I don’t know if- if I even- _can_. Anymore.” He’s blushing. “I mean-”

“Did I ask for you to do anything? Don’t worry yourself.” He kisses the curve of Little’s neck, the triangle of his collarbone. It’s enough to be touching Little- Edward- someone, someone alive and present.

He finds no physical response from himself, but Tozer puts that down to the fact that he’s more ill than he’s ever been before in his life. Little seems to be doing better. That’s enough. It’s funny, the man he’d been three years ago wouldn’t have believed it possible to be satisfied by giving satisfaction alone, his own cock still soft between his legs. But the man of three years ago didn’t know anything. Tozer will take what he can get.

Little does come after all, with a choked cry as he spills over Tozer’s fist. His eyes are wide and glassy. “ _Christ.”_ His cheeks are flushed beneath the dead white fingers of frostbite reaching across them.

Tozer watches him, pleased and not a little smug. “There you go.” He kisses Little again and doesn’t even mind the blood.

“Should I- ?”

“It’s fine. I don’t need anything.” He’s still only managed to get to half-mast and doubts that there’s anything more in store, but it’s not really the impotency that is embarrassing.

Little’s hands flutter over Tozer’s shoulders before settling there like confused moths batting about a gas lamp. “What do you want? Please tell me.”

It’s just so pathetic, what he really wants. But the shared sleeping sack is hot with their exertions and he _has_ gotten Little off, so Tozer asks. “Could you- hold me, please.” It seems dirty somehow, even more dirty that having Little’s cock in his hand. It’s intimacy of a different kind, to acknowledge that all he wants is to do is try and sink into Little’s ribcage and stay there. “Could you just-”

He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Little presses forward, hesitantly at first but then with more confidence as Tozer shifts eagerly to accommodate him wriggling into his space, wrapping his arms around Tozer’s waist as he pushes his face into Tozer’s chest, as though he’s trying to find a heartbeat.

“If we had a bed,” Tozer murmurs, “if we had a cabin. A house. And the proper space and time.”

“Yes- yes. I know.”

“If my teeth weren’t falling out.”

“If you smelled a bit better, too,” Little mutters, but he’s smiling.

They hold each other. They sleep. And neither of them dream.

Each day is so like every other that Tozer can’t keep track of how many pass, or if any pass at all: a man falls sick, another dies. The weak fire burns in the pit they have dug. There is something charred among the coals that Tozer cannot let himself look at too closely. The canvas ripples in the wind and rots, and the smell of charred flesh mixes with the metallic cold of the air.

It seems that the men are simply slipping off into sleep, one by one. Tozer makes a round of the camp, as if plant or animal life will have sprung up unexpectedly since the last time he made a patrol. That could have been anytime from an hour to a week ago, he can’t tell anymore.

Nothing shows itself. It doesn’t matter- he’s not even hungry. He just feels empty, and light as a feather. It isn’t a bad feeling, really. He thinks he could walk for miles, away from the camp and everything. If the lieutenant would come with him.

He ducks his head beneath the half-collapsed tent where Little sits, staring blankly across the barren landscape. “Nothing new out there.”

Little turns his head up to look at him, slowly as if moving through water. “Ah.”

“Not that I was expecting much,” Tozer adds quietly.

“Sit. No sense in you walking in circles and seeing nothing.” Little stretches out a hand and Tozer takes it, folding his legs as he hunkers down next to where Little is sat.

Tozer leans against the canvas, tucking his head against Little’s shoulder. He’s so tired, and any body heat between them is more likely than not a figment of Tozer’s own imagination. But it feels good to be close. He’s glad that Little is here. He doesn’t know what he’d do without him. Probably just sit down and wait to die, really.

Little has taken out his watch again, letting the gold chain slip through his fingers over and over. The cold clink of it is soothing.

“Afraid someone will steal it?” Tozer says with as much humour as he can muster, burrowing closer and wrapping an arm around Little. His shoulder aches with the stretch of skin and muscle. It has never really healed: barring some act of God, who seems to be fully occupied elsewhere or simply uninterested, it likely never will.

“It doesn’t have my name on it or anything like that. But it’s an English watch.” Little lets the lid of the watch click open to reveal the glass face, second hand still ticking serenely on. That gives Tozer comfort. Despite everything, Little has still always wound his watch. “If I’m found, I’d like. I’d like for people to know who I was. Where I came from. Why I was here, so far from home.”

Tozer glances up at the side of his face. “Lieutenant…”

“Should I keep hold of it, here in my hand? Should I put it around my neck? Should-”

“Edward.” Tozer reaches out and closes his hand over Little’s, snapping the pocket watch shut between their palms. “It’s alright.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.” Tozer presses closer. “You’re just tired. Go to sleep. I’ll keep an eye out.”

“You’ll wake me in three hours,” Little instructs, and rattles the watch between their joined hands. “Or if anything changes. Sergeant. Solomon.”

If anything changes? What is going to change? Nothing is going to change. “I’ll wake you in three hours.” Tozer bends his head to kiss the back of Little’s hand before settling in more comfortably against his side. He gazes out through the ragged strips of canvas across the wide open landscape.

They wait to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: [and it was about four or five hours later that Crozier (remember Crozier? It's a show about Crozier) Crozier came by and with a few nasty words about scurvy on the side, dragged us out of the tent, and we went back to Silna’s camp, had a lead-free dinner that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up until the next morning, when we all had to get yelled at for being idiots-](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM&t=2s) shh it's a happy ending


End file.
